Posts by izogi
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Fiona has to speak on a panel about Survivor-style reality shows at the weekend, so we watched a Survivor-style reality show for a while last night. Indeed, it may actually have been Survivor. I wouldn't know. They all look the same to me, and all the contestants seem like people I'd try and avoid down the pub.
Nobody's yet mentioned American Cannibal. It's a documentary film that did the festival rounds a few years back, following two writers struggling to get work then ending up in the reality TV market writing awful stuck-on-an-island-where-cannibalism-was-legal scenarios for a show where contestants were told the loser would be eaten, or something like that.
As far as I'm aware it was a hoax, although the filmmakers and the writer/actor who came out to the festival weren't saying so. Hoax or not, it was disgustingly amusing on several levels. IMDB rates it low, although the ratings are very polarised if you drill into it.
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The only social tool that remained fully working was facebook; my Chilean friends say that FB went into overdrive for both businesses and friends checking in and confirming their family/employees/friends status, relieving not just people but i would have thought also taking pressure off the telephone network.
Facebook was impressive in this situation. My fiancé spent her 6th form year in a small town (100,000 people) called Curicó about 100km from the epi-centre. It's small enough in population that it barely registers -- in 2007 when I told my Santiago-based español class at the end of my first week that I was visiting Curicó for the weekend, they couldn't understand why on earth I'd want to go there. The only news report of any sort that we could find was a single bulletin in spanish that claimed "80% of the town had been flattened". She eventually tracked down her 10 or so closest friends through Facebook within a couple of days to confirm they were okay (although some were still without places to live), and one of her friends had also posted a collection of photos from around Curicó. Among other things she picked out the doors of her favourite ice cream shop under a pile of rubble. The large church in the centre of town, which they'd only just finished rebuilding 50 years after the 1960 earthquake, sustained heavy damage all over again. It must be terribly disheartening for many many people.
In time it turned out that the "80% flattened" figure was to do with all the older buildings and churches in the centre of town, but not so much the housing blocks around the sides where everyone was sleeping. I think the Curicó death toll was only about 40 people, but I'm struggling to say "only" because in most contexts that'd be a terrible disaster, and obviously it still is for many people, but in retrospect they also got off lightly. If it'd struck during the day it probably would have had a much heavier toll. Chile has good building standards with regard to earthquakes, and some of their less stable older buildings probably disintegrated in 1960 and were re-built better, but this was just such a seriously big amount of energy that solid building standards didn't always count.
Actually being stuck in New Zealand as we woke up on Sunday morning and wanting to find out about Chile was very frustrating. Our internet was down with a neighbour chopping a tree, and the only thing the media here was talking about was the impending tsunami in New Zealand. (I can appreciate why, of course.) We hopped over to my parents' place to borrow their internet and ended up watching some CNN, which was giving lots of information about the situation in Chile until the tsunami began to get close to Hawaii at which point the Chile focus abruptly stopped as they switched to perpetually showing live footage of empty Hawaiian beaches in hope that something interesting would happen.
I guess it showed us both how much we'd been taking the internet for granted with respect to quality information about what's happening overseas. It's not just access to foreign media and blogs, it's the whole thing.
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Tsunami are also earthquake-triggered: there are deep trenches offshore from where I live that have triggered past tsunami by slumping.
Supposedly the coast around Kaikoura is at risk of this, as I heard a while ago. A 5 second google search popped up this NIWA paper from 2006 which (from the abstract) describes the off-shore underwater landscape as having "substantial potential for a submarine landslide", and that such a landslide generated tsunami "represents a large potential hazard to the area from South Bay to Oaro" in the South Island.
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But he also said a lot of people went down to the beach to watch it.... I guess some things never change.
I've lately wondered if GNS staff and media organisations should consider avoiding using the word "wave" to describe a tsunami.
It's correct scientifically but it's also completely misleading to people who don't typically think of a water wave as a surging wall of water with a 100 km wavelength of force behind it that won't slow down and stop as it comes up the beach. Just listening to some people being interviewed about why they were going to watch made that fairly clear. A 50 cm wave can be very destructive.
Meanwhile back at Talcahuano Port across the Pacific, there are some telling pictures of what a 2 metre tsunami can easily do (eg. scroll to 33, 34 and 35).
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Hi Ben.
In my opinion it is very sad that religion dies out in our societies. On the one hand religion is an important notion of culture and on the other hand it establishes a broad moral basis, which can be only achieved by intense philosophical studies.
I don't think religion's going anywhere. It's been with us far too long. The details might change and the moral basis might change, but there will always be people choosing to believe something on faith. As often as not, I see people framing the religion to match moral beliefs they already have, and adding religion to the mix of my own morals isn't something that appeals to me.
I think it's pointless to try to convince anyone to change their beliefs, but I threw a small amount at the campaign because I don't think for a moment that changing people's minds is what the campaign is about. If anything, I guess I hope it could highlight that non-believers actually exist, and aren't as immoral or unethical due to the lack of religion as some make them out to be. In some pockets of New Zealand, maybe it'll demonstrate to a few that it's okay to reject religion, if they want to, without becoming a social outcast.
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As an aside (though not directly related to the Pacific), anyone wanting insight about the mechanics of what happens in large scale long term disaster relief operations could learn much from browsing the blog of Bob McKerrow. He's the New Zealander currently directing the Red Cross operation in Indonesia, and he blogs about the details of everything happening there frequently.
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NatRad was still going on about the Adagio fiasco on Midday Report. There were gasps, apparently, from members of the audience, when the offending words were spoken and the offending orgasm faked.
I was at least impressed they didn't just go to McCoskrie for an easy quote about how awful the entire thing was. (I'm assuming they still haven't done so.) Still, the lack of an attempt to present any information to justify the tone of the report seemed unusual.
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But, because it was CYF, the moral outrage that no one actually seems to be expressing is news all over this morning.
I woke up to this at 7 and found the whole report very confusing. If the reporter had wanted to make some kind of point, you'd think she could have at least found someone other than herself to speak out against it as opposed to interviewing CYF staff, Downstage staff, and other people present, none of whom seemed to have any serious concerns.
I thought I may have missed something in my semi-conscious state, but having read the other thoughts here it seems I didn't.
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On PINs, I was yesterday with a recently-arrived German friend as he was buying something with his credit card and trying to figure out where he was supposed to sign, as the slip hadn't printed out at that point.
Coming from a country where credit cards almost never have PINs (according to him), he told me he'd feel very insecure if a PIN could ever be used to authenticate his card, and felt much safer signing instead.
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It's one of the main reasons tipping is such a huge emotional trigger for many in the US-it's effectively a voluntary subsidy to prop up someone's salary.
A few weeks ago I ran into someone who spent a lot of time as a waitress somewhere in the US. She thought something like 80% of her salary came through tips, and that'd be about US$180 on a good night, I think, for wherever it was that she worked. What surprised me, though, was when she explained how the waiting staff are often required to then tip the kitchen staff a portion of the tips they get, about 30% in her case. So if you tip them something for the service, you can't even guarantee they'll get to keep it. And this is why they often prefer tips in cash rather than electronically, since the cash tips can't be traced anywhere near as easily by the restaurant.
I guess if you live in that system with so many under-the-table expectations that are taboo to talk about, it makes some kind of sense. To me it seems confusing.